Fairy Tales

The fire popped, showering sparks unheeded against the stone. Cloth of gold burned surprisingly quickly, it turned out. Burned – melted? Mira stared at the remains at the edge of the hearth. A little of both? There did seem to be some gold left.

“This is not happening.”

That did not, strictly speaking, seem to be true. She tried to come up with something to say. “Why did you leave it so close to the fire?”

Var’s head whipped up, stung. They’d had other things on their minds when he’d taken them off. “You said you were cold!”

“I meant for you to keep me warm, idiot!”

“It wasn’t in the fire until you kicked it.”

“I can’t help being ticklish.” He probably hadn’t meant to tickle her, but… So they were a little awkward still. They were figuring it out.

The girl sat in the stone window-ledge. She was graceful, beautiful, talented, all the gifts given to her at her birth. She’d had plenty of time to wonder if they had been worth the cost.

Below her, the castle spread in silent grandeur. In every room, sleepers, hardly seeming to breathe, left where they had fallen. In the slanting autumn light, the air sparkled with dust that drifted and turned, but never hit the ground. Not here.

She hadn’t understood at first. Alone in the stillness, the unwaking bodies of two handmaids on the floor next to her bed, she had finally realized. The prince hadn’t come.

At the thought, her eyes fell to the brambles surrounding the castle walls. She saw no bleached skull, but she thought she knew what had happened all the same. She imagined she could see the spot — just there, where the roses bloomed in dusky glory every summer.

He had died. And then the funny thing had happened; the angry fairy’s power at last had broken. The girl had no idea how many years had passed until then, or how many since. The cruelest joke was that it was the “kindness” of the fairy who had saved her that had kept them all trapped. The fairy had caught the castle out of time until the prince should arrive. And then he never did.

So here she was, still sixteen, a phantom of longing drifting through the halls, promise eternally unfulfilled. Outside, the seasons turned. Inside, she waited for the last spell to break. She closed her eyes and wished that her parents had not been so eager for magical gifts, that they had let her birth go unremarked and let her take her chances with an ordinary life. When the distant geese flew by, obedient to the dictates of time, ordinary seemed like the most extraordinary thing she could imagine.

In the courtyard below, a yellow leaf ceased its eternal circling and slipped down to touch the pavement.

This week I’m combining the Write at the Merge prompt from Write On Edge and the weekly Trifecta Writing Challenge. Write at the Merge gave us the word “pine” and a photo of leaves falling on a deck, and Trifecta gave us the third definition of the word “phantom” (noun):

The queen sat by the fire and hummed softly to her son, rocking his cradle softly. The king, delighted by a boy, had yet disapproved of her choice. A ridiculous name, he’d said. Not fit for the heir to a kingdom.

And yet she’d had her way. She always did, now. Her father had sold her, and the king had locked her in a room full of straw and threatened to kill her, but that was over, all over. She was the queen who had spun straw into gold, and if there had been another in that tower room, if there had been promises made, that had been before. She was the golden queen and could do no wrong.

They burst into the room, an angry swarm of king and advisors and guards, and the imp. The imp stood alone with uncanny grace, skin dusky, eyes only for her. He raised his hand, and a hush fell, the kingdom’s great men choked to silence on their own choler.

“It is the third day, and your last chance.” His voice was like smoke and forest honey. “Can you guess my name?”

She met his eyes for a long moment, the months of waiting and knowing and powerlessness all boiling to the surface, plain on both their faces. Then she smiled, and reached down a hand to touch her sleeping son. “Rumleskaft.” The king reared back as if bitten. She could see the imp smiling out of the corner of her eye.

“You have me.” He made a half bow. “What is your wish?” His golden eyes were knowing.

She gathered up the baby in her arms. He opened his eyes sleepily, and a flash of gold showed through the brown before he gurgled happily and closed his eyes again. “I wish to leave this place.”

A deep bow, then she was in his arms. “As you desire.” Rumleskaft touched the baby’s cheek, then wrapped the darkness around them and swept them silently away.

Ailea stared at the door. She knew about his vanished wives when they married, but his smile had been so sweet. She’d trusted him and been happy. He’d asked her to leave that one room alone; she’d agreed.

But — there was a smell coming from it. An acrid, organic smell drifting faintly into the hallway. And there was something seeping under the door, a thick red-black substance she was afraid to touch. She couldn’t help wondering — what had happened to them, anyway?

She put the key in the lock and turned.

When he found her, hours later, she was still flat on her back. There was a heart-shaped bruise on her forehead like a brand where an ornamental paperweight had hit her on the way down.

“Your mother insisted I take it all.” He was apologetic. “I would have trashed it, except I think her best friend is a witch, and she had a manic look at the wedding. I’m not sure it’s safe.” He started pulling crocheted blankets and wobbly hand-thrown urns off the pile. “It’s the jams that get me. At least, I think they’re jams.”

Her ankle was sticky with the horrifying ooze that turned out to have come from an overturned jar. “Let’s not find out,” she croaked.

He made a devoutly affirmative noise and dug. The stench was terrible. She recognized it, now — her mother’s attempt at making handbags from home-tanned leather. She’d tried to forget that phase.

“I’m not sure this is enough room. We could get rid of the stuff Lakshmi left when she ran off to Ishendi. She seems to be enjoying being a belly-dancer too much to bother sending for it.”

She sat up, finally. “It’s fine. We’ll shove it all back in and brick it up.”

He gave her that sweet, unassuming smile. “Whatever you like.”

She reached out one dusty hand to touch his cheek, caress the ridiculous beard. “I love you.”

Evadne stood behind the hulking armoire and stared as the middle-aged queen thrust something under the lowest mattress and tiptoed triumphantly out. Evadne sighed. What the hell kind of place was this? The house was beautiful, a vision of architectural details without and sumptuous within, but if it hadn’t been raining, she would have gone off to sleep in a haystack.

She probably should have known from the way they’d reacted to finding out she was a princess. The prince, it transpired, was having trouble finding a wife. Evadne had opinions on why that was, but her attempts to indicate that it was really none of her business had gone completely unnoticed. Neither of them seemed to grasp the fact that Evadne wouldn’t have taken the man as a gift, much less competed for him.

Evadne dropped down next to the bed and shoved an arm in to fish for whatever the queen had left. A hard, grainy lump rolled under her fingers, and she pulled it out. A pea. “Seriously?” She dropped her forehead against the preposterous tower of mattresses, where it sank in with a squish.

God, she was glad she was going home. The weirdness out here never ended. But her father hadn’t been born a king; he was an old campaigner, and when he’d sent her on this trip, it wasn’t to end up with an heir incapable of dealing with a lumpy mattress. Just a few more days. Evadne reached up, yanked the covers off into a nest on the rug, and slept like a log.

“How did you sleep?” The queen smirked.

“Beautifully!” Evadne said, cheerily shoveling down as much breakfast as she could manage. “Thanks for the pea, by the way. Such a practical gift; flowers and food all at once.” She stood up and walked to the door. “I think I’ll take it with me, if you don’t mind.”

She waved, stepped out into the sun, and smiled. Dad always did like a garden.

This week, a return to my fairy tale retellings as inspired by the gorgeous photos of The Breakers for the Write at the Merge prompt this week. I also worked in this week’s Trifecta Writing Challenge, which called for 33 to 333 words on the third definition of the work GRASP (verb):

Her feet carried her slowly, unwillingly, down the forest path. A hush had fallen, and the gentle clatter of branches and the quiet squeak of the fresh snow under her boots were the only sounds she could hear. The wolf was pacing her out at the edges of sight, no more than a grey whisper among the grey trees. It wouldn’t come any closer, not yet, but she could feel it waiting.

She pulled the crimson cloak closer around her against a cold she barely felt. It had been a gift from her grandmother, a token of an affection that now made her skin crawl. Under the sun, the cloak flamed, impossible to miss. Here, under the trees at the last tail of dusk, it faded to the color of old blood, melting into the dark as if it belonged there. The obscurity was strangely comforting.

Worn-out shoes. That’s what it came down to. He was risking his life for worn-out shoes. He shifted back on his heels in the mud, and raised his fingers to the place where a thorn had torn a sticky gash in his neck. He’d had far worse, but it was all of a piece with this whole night.

The thing had stank from the beginning. Find the secret in three nights or be put to death? What sort of offer was that? But the king was a father and fathers got desperate. He hadn’t been far from desperate himself — out of a job, out of money, about to exhaust his options. No one seemed to want his nicked and battered sword or equally battered self.

The stillroom was a wreck. Elanne pressed a frustrated hand to her face, and surveyed the damage from between her fingers. The floor glittered with shards of glass, here the remains of a green bottle, there what was left of a clear one, and all of it glistening with the spirits she’d been storing here. A sweet, herbal tang filled the air so thickly she could almost taste it. She didn’t need to wonder what had happened. Her stepdaughter. Of course.

This, she thought with a wince, might really be the worst of the things she had to hold against her parents about this whole process. She experimentally took a hand away from one ear just in time to hear a particularly off note be followed by a sharp twang and a startled squawk. Broken lute string? She had given up hoping that would shut him up.

The tower thing was ridiculous all around, and she had plenty of things to say about the arrangements for her so-called comfort if she ever got the chance. She was beyond sick of looking at the walls in here and so bored that nearly anything would have been an improvement. But this?

The frog contemplated the golden ball. It glittered through the murky water, half-buried in the black silt of the pond’s bottom. He could hear the princess crying above, her voice weirdly distorted by the water but still distinguishable. The wavering image on the surface showed him a green dress and dark red hair. Red. Never his favorite.

He swam over and prodded the ball with one sticky toe. It was his way out of this mess, he supposed. Back to the old life of flavored ices and servant girls, assuming he could avoid marrying the weeper. He slowly blinked the nictitating membrane across his eye, the best he could do for a nostalgic sigh in this clammy body. It had been a good life, if not useful. He’d been an idle prince at best, years from responsibility in a peaceful kingdom that did just fine with no help from him. Lovely.

His parents had put it about that it had been a spiteful fairy, he’d heard. It probably sounded better than admitting that he’d insulted a witch on his way out of her rumpled cottage bed the second night, and that she had decided sliminess suited him. True love. He would have rolled his eyes if he could have. But it only had to be true love for her, didn’t it? That might not be so hard.

Red-headed, though. He peered up through the water, trying to discern what sort of figure was attached to all that red hair. Hm. He pushed off of the golden ball with a back foot, and swished back into the depths of the pond. Princesses were so much work, after all. And perhaps a blonde would come by later.